Sunday, November 27, 2016

U.S. mathematics, as of November 27, 2016

Why did I wake up early Sunday morning to read CNN (before CM)?
So I could find little gems like this:


No doubt fair use applies here, because I don't want to take credit for CNN's material.  It looks like one of Frod's lesser students was hired by CNN to create pie charts.

Sincerely,

7 comments:

  1. Shortly after the election, Neil deGrasse Tyson launched a new educational initiative:

    "Make America smart again."

    Fair use isn't the only potential problem with this, um, chart. Another is COOTIES!

    And it isn't what my lesser students can do. Those are mostly all down at the sheep unit. This is what my BETTER students can do: it has numbers and OOO!---even percentages, doesn't it? If I therefore DARE not give it partial credit, they're guaranteed to run crying to the Dean, sobbing about how I "hate students" and "want to destroy [their] careers." Explaining that I don't need to do that, since they're doing that well enough themselves, gets anything from a deer-in-the-headlights look to (and I jest not) SMILES, as if I've paid them a COMPLIMENT.

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  2. The name of this chart should be "red/green colorblind people can go suck it, for all I care." Actually, that should be the name of *most* charts.

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  3. Help, I'm a humanist. Is there a problem with this chart beyond the blinding color scheme?

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    Replies
    1. The slices of this cherry (or strawberry or rhubarb) pie add up to only around 80% instead of 100%. The employee that created the pie probably forgot to insert another slice worth about 20% that said, "all other countries." Or maybe s/he thinks 80% = 100%.

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    2. LOL! Embarrassed I didn't catch that, but thanks for showing me.

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    3. Not to mention that Japan's 20.6% plus the U.S.'s 20% take up 50% of the chart, and China's 21.7% takes up well more than 25% of it. Those were the first things that caught my eye. The color business didn't occur to me at all, but it's obviously a problem.

      The heart in the middle is just plain silly, but since it doesn't affect the functionality of the chart, I suppose we can't take off points for that.

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    4. Its a pie chart. Pie charts are inherently shitty. Especially if the numbers are similar (by which I mean anything other than a 90/10 division of the pie). The human ie is REALLY bad at differentiating between angles. If you want to compare these figures, show it in a bar chart. Anyone can then see which one of the bars is higher than the other.

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